Justice For All

As an attorney, Jim Coleman ’66; P’16 took on high-profile pro bono death penalty cases with the conviction that every defendant has a constitutional right to fair and equal treatment according to the rule of law. Later, as a longtime professor at Duke Law School, he co-founded the Duke Law Wrongful Convictions Clinic in 2008 to investigate plausible claims of innocence by people incarcerated for felonies in North Carolina. The clinic has since secured exonerations for 11 clients, many of whom served several decades in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.

In October, Coleman returned to campus to accept this year’s John and Elizabeth Phillips Award, which recognizes an Exonian who has contributed significantly to the welfare of community, country or humanity. “You have led nationally recognized efforts on behalf of death penalty reform and the wrongfully convicted and have mentored and inspired a new generation of lawyers with what one longtime friend calls your distinctive blend of ‘passion and principle,’” Sam Brown ’92, trustee and president of Exeter’s General Alumni Association, said while delivering the award citation in Assembly Hall.

In his acceptance remarks, Coleman mentioned the award’s first recipient, Burke Marshall ’40, who was assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil rights division during President John F. Kennedy's administration. “For me to be associated with Burke Marshall through Exeter and this award has special meaning,” Coleman said.

He also spoke about growing up in a three-room house with his parents and six siblings in Charlotte, North Carolina, and attending racially segregated schools. “Our schools were intentionally denied the resources that white public schools received,” he said. “But the Black teachers at our inferior schools did not saddle us with the heavy burden of being told that the students were inferior.”

Instead, Coleman said, his teachers instilled the confidence that, with hard work, he could achieve whatever he set out to do. When he was in 11th grade, his guidance counselor connected him with a white friend of hers who wanted to pay for a student from his school to attend a five-week summer program at Exeter.

“In June 1964, I packed my cheap metal footlocker that I purchased with money I earned as a caddie and boarded a Greyhound bus for an 830-mile trip north,” Coleman recalled. He ended up not only staying for that summer, but also returning for a postgraduate year in 1965 after his graduation from high school in Charlotte. “That year … was the best and most important academic experience of my life,” he said.

Though relatively few Black students attended Exeter at the time, Coleman said he wasn’t made to feel like an outsider by his teachers or classmates. “That allowed me to do my best, unencumbered by the kind of self-doubts engendered by the ongoing public debates that take place today about whether students of color should be at places like Exeter,” Coleman said. “The only question is not whether they belong at places like Exeter, but what places like Exeter can do to ensure their success as students.”

Coleman credited his experience at Exeter with teaching him to be a stronger, more confident and engaged student, and showing him the possibility of opportunities he had never been able to imagine before he came to the Academy. He went on to attend Harvard University and Columbia Law School, then practiced law in New York and Washington, D.C., becoming the first Black partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in 1982. He has taught full time at Duke Law since 1996.

“My presence at Exeter changed both me and Exeter,” Coleman said near the end of his remarks. “My life story became part of Exeter’s story and my subsequent accomplishments became part of Exeter’s legacy.”